Up until recently†, I'm not aware of a situation where a popular Firefox extension was unable to work in Chrome due to Google restrictions.
†I'm purposefully excluding the whole adblock thing, as that's super recent and thus not relevant here.
I actually still think the API design was a good idea and am glad for the added security. Still, the API change took down some popular extensions for sure.
Now there is no more middle click to submit on forms and I used that at my old job to speed up a bunch of tedious tasks.
It is, and it boils down to the usual security vs. utility tradeoff - beyond some point, more secure means less useful. Kernel access is a stretch, but then again, I could make my computing experience much more pleasant if I had a deeper ability to control and inspect the browser from external software running on my computer.